Hub for “Public Awareness of Language at Monash” (PALM)

Overview

Language, and how we use it, is often misunderstood. Language is intricate and multifaceted. It varies across cultures, regions and social groups, and it often requires a lot of implicit knowledge to understand it well. Misinformation about language is , therefore, all too common. And this can have disastrous consequences in places where communication is critical, like in our schools, courts or hospitals. Linguistics - the systematic and scientific analysis of language - has a vital role to play in better informing the general public’s understanding of language and society. It is crucial to ensure linguistic insights reach them, so we can further spark their interest in this scientific discipline and raise awareness on the use of language in vital areas of society.

The Hub for Public Awareness of Language at Monash (PALM) provides the public with a better understanding of language and language use. PALM is a hub of some of Australia’s top science communicators on the topic of language. PALM’s members are some of Australia’s most visible and innovative language scholars. We are media personalities, podcasters, textbook authors and Conversation authors. We collaborate with schools, industries and governments to make sure language research informs best practice. Our research investigates how people view and use language, and how it shapes the way we think.

Our passion is to see this research inform and foster better societies. Our plan of action involves three main aims. First, we want to create greater public awareness of how language works. We aim to stimulate public curiosity in language science and make learning about language fun. Second, we want to inform. Better understandings of language make for better societies. Third, we want to get people to get creative with language, and see the endless possibilities of language play. It is our core belief that science communication is a public dialogue. PALM creates this dialogue through the outreach activities and citizen science projects it undertakes. We aim in
the first instance to share our passion - linguists are language lovers. Yet, we also aim - in sharing this collective joy - to take on the role of (often playful) myth-busters, interacting with a public that is more aware of the scientific underpinnings of language.

What we do

PALM is a hub of language researchers who believe that research insights have become a matter of the public good. Australians are facing a media “infodemic” of misinformation and disinformation. Linguists and language researchers play a critical role in engaging with the public and fostering a more informed, aware and engaged society.
PALM’s members pursue this goal through:
* Media engagement
* Industry engagement
* School engagement
* Innovations in science communication
* Sharing insights and fostering a community of public language scholars

A taste of our exciting work across these categories:

Our media engagement is robust, but we’re particularly excited that Kate Burridge has a regular spot with Sammy J, the host of ABC Radio Melbourne’s Breakfast. If you’re looking for some fun reads, Kate and Howie Manns have more than 40 pieces on The Conversation website.

Our favourite industry engagement right now is Louisa Willoughby’s work with Able Australia and the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI). Louisa and her research team are investigating deafblind communication and using their findings to develop training and certification for Auslan interpreters and communication guides.

We are proud to do a lot of school engagement but Jill Vaughan’s (co-founded) “Linguistics Roadshow” changed the way young Victorians engaged with linguistics. And it just doesn’t feel right not to give a shout out to Kate Burridge for her new co-authored VCE textbooks, Love the Lingo and Living Lingo.

We are dedicated to discovering innovations in science communication. One common question is how to measure our impact? Ward Peeters is pioneering new measurement tools to answer this very question, together with the IMPACTLAB in the Netherlands. And can changing our grammar, engaging in wordplay and choosing the right metaphor make our science communication more appealing? This is the question Howie, Kate and colleagues at La Trobe University and UWA are seeking to answer. Sharing insights and fostering a community of public language scholars. We have a broad network of collaborations with other universities and the community. We love sharing our insights but we’re also keen to build a community of scholars dedicated to engaging with the public, getting them excited and curious about language, and creating greater public awareness of language research!

Who we are

Kate Burridge is the Director of PALM. Kate is Australia’s best-known media personality in linguistics, frequently appearing on radio, TV, print and online publishing, blogs, podcasts. Kate has written three popular books on linguistics: Blooming English (CUP/ABC Books); Weeds in the Garden of Words (CUP/ABC Books); Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History (HarperCollins). She has also written five tertiary textbooks and five secondary textbooks. Throughout the year, Kate delivers invited talks to schools, industry and the community.

Howie Manns is an Assistant Director of PALM. Howie is the most prolific author on the topic of Language for The Conversation. He frequently appears in Australian and international media, including the ABC, BBC, SBS, Fairfax, News Corp, the New York Times and the Economist. He is a frequent podcast guest, appearing on the SBS’s The Idiom and Is English Hard? No! and the ABC’s Imagine This! Howie often speaks and runs workshops for Australian teachers, industries and community groups. He is currently co-leading a large- scale collaboration with Australian and Indonesian government, business and educational partners to increase the number of Australian students taking up the Indonesian language (with colleagues from Monash, UWA, Sydney Uni and Melbourne Uni).

Lucien Brown is passionate about creating a more holistic understanding of language and communication. When we speak, we don’t just use words and sounds, but also gestures and other embodied practices to convey meaning. And language is not something that we use just to convey information, but also to form relationships, express our emotions, and construct our identities. Lucien’s research talks to the importance of including these aspects of language in the ways that second languages are taught in schools and universities, and he is a frequent public speaker on this topic. Lucien has also authored several second language textbooks for learners of the Korean language.

Alice Gaby is passionate about supporting community-led efforts to reawaken and revitalise Indigenous languages. An important component of this work is developing plain language explanations of linguistic terms, concepts and methods so that community researchers are able to find and interpret archival records of their languages and translate them into language teaching and learning materials. To this end, Alice has served as a Linguistic Partner in the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages, and is a co-organiser of the Paper & Talk institute here in Australia. She has waxed enthusiastic about linguistics to booked-out crowds at pubs, museums, and community groups (such as the University of the Third Age—booked out for the first time on record for that chapter), as well as running workshops at primary and secondary schools in Victoria and Queensland. She has appeared on dozens of radio programs and podcasts across Australia, Europe and the US.

Hui Huang is passionate about learning and teaching a second language, focusing on English and Chinese. She is also dedicated to maintaining and educating Chinese as a heritage language in English-speaking countries. Furthermore, she has an enthralling interest in understanding the impact of language on the process of Chinese immigrants rebuilding their own identities. Hui Huang actively participates in local Chinese communities, providing support for language-related initiatives such as intergenerational language conversations and Chinese language learning programs, through her involvement with the Monash Chinese Senior Volunteer Association.

Shimako Iwasaki is a conversation analyst who enthusiastically investigates many aspects of  language and social interaction. She is passionate about understanding and illuminating the wide range of linguistic and embodied resources, senses and strategies that contribute to human interactions. Her studies range from an examination of everyday ordinary conversation, institutional conversations, and cross-/inter-cultural communication and focus on Japanese, signed and tactile signed conversations. Using conversation analytic methods and multimodality approaches, her work reveals not only what people are saying, but how they use multiple resources to accomplish diverse social actions. Shimako also works with blind and deafblind people mainly in Japan and Australia. In addition, Shimako actively participates in and engages with local Japanese communities, industries and government organizations to promote and advance Japanese language education and the relationship between Australia and Japan. In addition, she is an active member of the Victorian Japanese Speech Contest committee and serves for the Victorian Curriculum and AssessmentAuthority as a Language Specialist.

Anna Margetts is passionate about the documentation of endangered languages, multilingualism, and the interaction of speech and gesture. She is an educator whose research showcases the vital role of linguistic diversity and in particular of under-described minority languages for our understanding how human language actually works. She has collaborated with communities and digital archives on the documentation of indigenous languages of the Pacific, particularly in Papuan New Guinea. Her public engagement includes the open-access Saliba-Logea documentation corpus hosted by The Language Archive and the publication of local-language primary school readers. She is part of a Monash public-facing initiative producing videos about how language works and has been a consultant to individuals and bilingual play groups on topics including how children learn language, bringing children up bilingually and heritage language maintenance.

Satoshi Nambu is engaged in understanding the role of language use in our society, acknowledging that not only do languages change over time, but our beliefs about language also undergo significant change reflecting how we use the languages. As a collaborative researcher at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), he focuses on the impact of immigrants’ language use in public spaces. He has engaged with NPOs, city hall workers, and people in immigrant communities in Japan, aiming to influence language practices to create a society that offers better inclusion and opportunities. His work also explores the role of language in media and translation, exploring their potential effects on our beliefs about the languages we use and also perceptions of ourselves. He is also a passionate language educator and learner.

Ward Peeters is one of the research coordinators at IMPACTLAB, an inter-university knowledge centre that specialises in measuring the impact of science communication at Leiden University and Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He studies which factors contribute to the impact of science communication and how this impact can be measured. At the same time, he and the IMPACTLAB team have developed practical tools and instruments which allow for a more systematic approach to measuring impact. Ward is a computational linguist, writes opinion pieces on the role of language in our digital world, and has appeared on radio shows such as RN Drive (ABC radio) to discuss whether AI is the nail in the coffin for learning new languages.

Jill Vaughan has extensive experience in making linguistics accessible and exciting for school students, minoritised language speakers and the general public. In her outreach work she seeks to bring linguistics together with community language advocacy and equity and access in the classroom. She is a co-founder of the award-winning Linguistics Roadshow – a fun interactive showcase about the science of language for high-school students and an online hub of materials for students and teachers – and formerly Project Manager of the 50 Words Project – a project which aims to provide fifty words online in the Indigenous languages of Australia. For almost a decade, she has supported Indigenous community-led language work in partnership with institutions in Arnhem Land (Maningrida Arts and Culture, Bábbarra Women’s Centre, Maningrida College) and north-west Victoria (Mallee District Aboriginal Services, Chaffey Secondary College), producing dozens of community-oriented language resources. She has made numerous media contributions, including widely read articles in The Conversation and interviews with Radio National and The Guardian.

Louisa Willoughby works with institutions such as schools, hospitals and libraries to better understand how they can cater to clients who speak languages other than English. A passionate language educator, she has collaborated with Melbourne Polytechnic since 2010 on projects around the teaching of Auslan. She has served on curriculum writing panels for the VCE subject English Language and the TAFE Auslan training package and has co- authored a beginner Auslan textbook. She regularly conducts teacher professional development sessions and producing teaching resources across English language and Auslan. She is also a frequent radio guest on all things sociolinguistic and multilingual.

Zhichang Xu is a frequent guest and collaborator with SBS Chinese on topics like Chinese English, Chinese culture and the Chinese language. He most recently appeared on the SBS Learn English podcast, Is English Hard? No!; The Idiom (CultureVerse, SBS); a documentary on Lion Dancing (SBS), and podcasts on The translation of Chinese 龍 (Loong or Dragon); and Lion Dancing. Zhichang also contributes to international TESOL China Assembly (TCA) events, such as their Roundtable series and conferences. Zhichang is currently working on a community engagement contract research project (2024-2026) in partnership with the Chinese Xin Jin Shan Community Library in Ballarat, exploring Gen AI assisted translation of a Chinese author’s mythological works, with human post-editing and annotations, and corpus-based data analysis of Chinese cultural metaphors (in partnership with a research team at the Education University of Hong Kong).